Afghanistan is one of the least favored countries in the world to invest in. Country’s performance in ease of doing business, retaining domestic private investment and attracting foreign direct investments is extremely low. Key challenges pertaining business enabling environment in Afghanistan are summarized in four broad categories below: 1. Onerous Business Environment: Business environment in Afghanistan is burdensome resulting in daunting challenges faced by the Private Sector. Business environment is negatively affected by political instability, corruption, limited access to land, electricity, finance and lack of trust between government and the Private Sector. Complex government regulations, tax rates and tax administration are also major constraints on business activities. 2. Low investment and capital flight: Domestic and Foreign Investment are affected by unfavorable investment, regulatory and political conditions in the country. Attraction of new investment in a fragile country like Afghanistan can be very challenging, but it is necessary to retain existing investments. However, Afghanistan lacks a clear retention strategy that makes it difficult to retain current investments and results in capital flight. 3. Legal barriers on economic participation of women: Conducting business in Afghanistan is particularly difficult for women. The share of women among business owners in Afghanistan is the lowest in the world. There is lack of evidence-based research whether legal text limits women’s equal access to entrepreneurship opportunities or if legislative text translates into gender biased implementation. 4. Low institutional capacity: Institutional capacity in Afghanistan is a key challenge that results in bureaucracy, a complex regulatory framework, and widespread corruption. The overall objective of the project is to catalyze doing business reforms in Afghanistan. Project specific objectives are: 1. Streamline the legal and regulatory framework for doing business in select Doing Business Indicators. These will likely be: Dealing with Construction permits, Trading Across Border, Paying Taxes, Getting Electricity and Getting Credit. 2. Strengthen inter-agency coordination mechanisms on investment climate reforms and establish effective public-private dialogue mechanisms The implementation of the project started in January 2018. Since then, the project achieved significant milestones that contributed in improvement of business climate in Afghanistan: I. Drafted Doing Business Reform Memorandum for 10 Doing Business Indicators. It provides short, medium and long-term recommendations for GoIRA. The recommendations of the Memo have been imbedded in the 5-year national priority program on private sector development in Afghanistan as a roadmap to improve investment climate. II. The project supported Government of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GoIRA) in drafting a 5-year National Priority Program and short-term action plans for Private Sector Development in the country. III. The project helped the GoIRA in implementation of some of the recommendations under the DB reform memo. the project team reviewed and provided inputs in the revision of Limited Liability Company and new Insolvency laws. As a result of the recommendations, the country moved up in the ranking of countries in the Doing Business report from 183 in 2018 to 167 in 2019. IV. To strengthen coordination efforts, the project is providing technical support to Executive Committee on Private Sector development (PriSEC) to undertake coordination and monitor progress of reforms’ implementation. PriSEC is a high-level platform that coordinates and monitors reforms for private sector development.